Alfred & 1Password

I have always used an App to store all my passwords on my Mac. I have tried and used several different ones over the years. Recently, I switched back to using Agilebits’ 1Password from another App. 1Password 7 is really nice, a very stable, powerful App. After getting back into 1Password, I noted that the excellent Alfred App interacted with it. The way this works is very cool, check it out.

1Password Alfred Setup

To make 1Password work with Alfred you need to first tweak one setting in the 1Password Preferences Advanced Tab.

The Preferences open into the “General” Tab. Click on the “Advanced” Tab and you are presented with these very specialized, technical options:

Once you are in this area click on “Enable Spotlight and 3rd party app integrations.” Now, before you leave this Tab, read the fine print here:

Once you activate this setting, 1Password is setup to work with Alfred. Now, lets look at the Alfred end of things.

Alfred 1Password Setup

To begin, go into the Alfred Preferences area:

As you can see, Alfred interacts with several services and Apps on the Mac of which 1Password is one. You have to do three things here. First, click on “Enable 1Password Bookmarks” to start the service. Next, you have to decide whether you want to activate the 1Password data by typing in “1p” as the keyword in the Alfred window and then searching, or to “Show in default results without keyword.” I have tried it both ways and settled on the later, I type in what I want and look for the 1Password logo in the entries Alfred presents.

This is what this looks like in Alfred. In this case I typed in “Ooma” which is my phone service. I can login to their website:

You can see the 1Password icon in the listings. There is another listing for the website as well. Here is the really cool part. If I choose the 1Password Ooma listing, Alfred navigates to the website in Safari, inserts the login information and then automatically logs in for you! That is a totally cool feature. It does not do this auto-login on every site, but it does on most of them.

Conclusion

I am glad to be back using 1Password again. It is a super solid App with enough features to keep me happy and efficient. That fact that it works through Alfred is a giant plus for my workflow.